Lobsters

Pots of flesh

LOBSTER has long been known as a luxury food. But in colonial days in North America the crustacean was so plentiful and cheap that it was used to feed prisoners and indentured servants in place of valuable cod and mackerel. One group of Massachusetts servants became so fed up with their diet of lobster that they took their owners to court and won a judgment that it not be served to them more than three times a week.

Times, of course, have changed. Nowadays lobster is viewed as an expensive, high-status delicacy. Only a few months ago, Norma's restaurant at Le Parker Meridien hotel in New York was offering a lobster and caviar omelette priced at $1,000.

These two lively books look at different aspects of man's relationship with Homarus americanus, the American lobster, along the 4,500-mile rocky coast of Maine. The north-eastern American state is the most famous lobster fishery in the world; the noble crustacean earns its 7,000 lobster fishermen $150m-180m a year.

In “The Lobster Coast”, Colin Woodard uses the fishermen of Monhegan Island as the focus for a broad historical sweep, ranging from the settlers who arrived in Maine a decade before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, to onslaughts from Indian tribes, raids by the French and an influx of “rusticators” who put the state on the map as an idyllic holiday destination. The author suggests that Maine's isolated lobster-fishing communities continue to embody Jefferson's Utopian vision of America—“an egalitarian republic of small, self-sufficient producers, where democracy is practised directly by the citizens, and aristocratic privilege is unrecognised or unknown.”

The backbone of Trevor Corson's book is the ecology of lobsters—in particular, the research into why Maine's annual catch continues to rise while the number of lobsters on its sea-bed shows no sign of decreasing. Based on Little Cranberry Island, “The Secret Life of Lobsters” explains how fear of a decline in stocks led first to open hostility between the state's scientists, fishermen and government officials, and then to collaboration.

Today, Maine's lobstermen are conserving stocks through their willing adherence to state laws which dictate how the fishery is managed. There are limits on the number of lobster traps that can be set, and there are also strict rules on the minimum size that can be caught—which helps ensure that lobsters reproduce before capture—and on the maximum, which keeps the biggest lobsters in the breeding pool. Furthermore, egg-bearing females must be returned to the water, and conservation-minded lobstermen “V-notch” females, cutting a triangular indentation in a tail flipper to help keep them off the dinner table and in the breeding pool.

Both books note that although the conservation ethic of Maine currently supports a viable lobster population, the rugged, salt-scoured island communities themselves are now under threat. Suburbanisation is creeping up the coast and the purchasers of second homes are pricing locals out of the property market. While it appears that the future of the lobster is assured—at least for a while—the future of Maine's lobstermen is not.